The increasing capabilities and resources of integrated circuits, for example, ASICs and FPGAs, are making hardware implementations viable for some software designs. That is, some designs formerly implemented as software for execution on a processor may now be feasibly implemented as hardware. The re-programmability of devices such as FPGAs makes these types of devices especially attractive for a hardware implementation.
To re-implement a software design in hardware, the logic of the software program code must be recast in hardware terms, for example as a description in a hardware description language (HDL). The difficulty with which program code may be recast in HDL depends in part on the language in which the program is written, in addition to the specific application. For example, some programs are written in dynamically-typed languages. A dynamically-typed language allows the type of a variable to be changed with each assignment to that variable. The type of a variable is changed to the type of the right-hand side of an expression in an assignment statement. Example dynamically-typed languages include Matlab and Perl.
HDLs are generally strongly-typed. In a strongly-typed language the type of a variable does not change for the lifetime of the variable, and a variable may only be assigned with expressions that result in a compatible type. Thus, translation of a program from a dynamically-typed language to HDL is not straightforward.
A system and method that address the aforementioned problems, as well as other related problems, are therefore desirable.